Introduction

When colleges and universities started shutting down in March of 2020 in response to the spread of COVID-19, they were forced to move from in-person or semi-digital environments to fully online in a matter of days. This led to one of the largest educational technology experiments in history, with the average institution needing to move more than 500 courses online.¹ Many colleges were already developing or expanding online education programs prior to the pandemic, but for others the move to online education is new. With the fall 2020 semester, some institutions have attempted to re-open for in-person classes or opted for a hybrid model of holding classes online while bringing some students back to campus, but many are primarily offering distance learning.²

The educational technology (ed tech) used for delivering online classes is serving an essential role in allowing schools to continue teaching under unusual conditions. However, the ongoing shift to remote learning is leading privacy professionals, faculty, students, and others to focus on both pre-existing and new privacy issues related to the technology facilitating online learning. Given the younger age of the students in K-12, educators have recognized for some time that the use of ed tech in secondary school education raises privacy concerns. The devices used for K-12 education are more likely than those used in higher education to be issued to students or accessible in the classroom, and researchers and privacy advocates have long been concerned about the use of these devices for surveillance,³ school shooting prevention,⁴ and other secondary purposes that raise privacy issues.

Until fairly recently, higher education institutions focused more on the cybersecurity aspect of data protection. It was not until 2018 that privacy first showed up on the top 10 list of information technology issues in EDUCAUSE’s⁵ information technology poll of institutions.⁶ Privacy advocates and the media have brought greater attention to privacy in higher education in part due to the collection of student data for predictive analytics uses⁷ and greater on-campus surveillance of students.⁸ The increased use of remote learning, and the increasing amounts of student data they generate, will add to privacy concerns. There are clearly important questions about what happens to the data collected in the course of providing distance learning that institutions and ed tech companies need to answer.

Distance learning will likely be an important issue of discussion and scrutiny in higher education for some time. Schools will continue to rely on it as the pandemic continues, but there is also the potential for a longer-term shift to more distance education in the post-pandemic future. This paper offers an overview of privacy issues and concerns related to online learning in higher education.